Spring

Yes the cherry trees are flowering again !

This is like 2 blocks south from our building :).

Blog Tweak

Just a quick note to say that I changed the way images are displayed once you click on them. I suggest you try to click on the next picture (once the page has been fully loaded). It should allow you to preview bigger images without having to navigate back and forth and is prettier than what I was doing before.

I took this series of pictures over the weekend to see how small were the things that I could photograph. The result is pretty interesting, the diagonal of the picture represent about 4mm in the real world. It was quite a pain to set the whole thing up (belows, reflex box, chimney visor, 35mm lens+ about 20cm extensions, tripod and a lot of patience).

Portland Japanese Garden

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day in Portland, the warm sunshine was enticing us to spend more time out. We had convinced Ian and Janel to tag come with us to the Japanese Garden in the hope to see the Sakura trees all pink (they were originally headed for the Chinese Garden). Once we got there I was a bit disappointed because there was only one Sakura flowering in the entire garden, but it seemed we came during the most popular day of the year. The garden was swarmed by photographers with tripods and SLR, snapping every corner of the peaceful garden to death. Ian and myself proceeded to imitate them while M and J were going around enjoying the place.

The light was great in the shady areas. It looks quieter on the pictures than it actually was unfortunately.

The Camelias were all out flowering.

We finished the afternoon in the Rose Garden, unfortunately the roses had just been pruned, but it was still enjoyable as we were surrounded by all the other flowers.

We finished the day going to the theater to watch Alice in Wonderland (Johnny Depp is great there, as usual).

HDR

This morning when I woke up and looked through the window I thought that it would be a perfect background for an HDR photo of our living room. I kind of hate the HDR (High Dynamic Range + tone mapping) effect, I usually associate it to kitsch but after someone sent me to stuckincustoms I thought I still should try as it doesn't have to be always horrible and it would entertain me for a bit. I'm not super happy with the results, but I still think it's quite interesting and it shows how our place is.


Stormy weather outside


Preparing for the Zombies attack ;).

Hillsboro Flower Farm

Everyday, on our way to and back from work we take Jackson School road. This is a pretty rural area. During the spring I stopped on the right side of the road to take some pictures: Here on my blog - Spring fields. I regret not stopping on the way back to take pictures of the flower farm with its fields all colorful. I guess I'll do it next year.

Today on the back from work, I stopped on the right side of the road and finally took a few pictures of the flower farm. It is quite cute with its little windmill, the colors were vibrant under the sunset. Here it is (stitch of 3 images and cropped, but this would be my standard field of view the day I upgrade to a M9).

More Chicago Pictures

Our trip to Chicago was the first time I actually brought 2 cameras with me :). Yes I am becoming really impossible but I had plenty of room in my luggage ! Well I can look for excuses, but I really don't need any. I am just having a lot of fun going around taking pictures, especially with obsolete cameras. This round of pictures comes from my early 50's Zeiss folder. It takes a bit more time fiddling with it, I have to reload every 12 pictures, and the "fast" speed of 1/500s appears to not be working anymore: I have had so many blank pictures with it that I am just giving up. Welcome f/22 pictures.

The good thing with film is that it takes a while before seeing the pictures so there is a lot of anticipation when the film finally comes back and I take the time to scan it.

This time it was even worse, my usual lab had been switching building and they had not restarted operating their B&W lab, so there was an additional week of waiting after I dropped the 6 rolls of 120 I had taken. At this occasion I also discovered that I should label my films better, and that color film could actually be developed in B&W chemicals and still produce a decent image... Yeah I kind of wasted a roll by not being careful...

Anyways after cutting the film, putting it on the holders (I must be gauche, it takes me forever to get it right each time), blowing of dust and cat fur, I can scan it and finally enjoy the pictures. Damn cat fur it gets e-very-where !

A few samples for you:

Trump building, downtown Chicago

Navy Pier, on the Lake

Arrrrhhh

Looking towards Canada, Lake Michigan

Feeling like jumping over the river in a cop car ? I can't stop myself from thinking about the Blues Brothers in that place ;).

As usual the rest of the selection is here.

Bridgetown Swing

Last week we joined M's dad at his West Coast Swing convention. I took advantage of it to take a few pictures of dancers. Despite it not being the first time I still find it quite difficult to capture the right instant and nail the focus perfectly (in the dark, very large aperture and manual focus).

You can find a few more here.
Anyway, it was interesting to see him and M dance and also see what the "pros" would do.

B&W Portland

The other day I had to go to the lab to get some film developed and I decided to just do the 4 miles by foot and bring a camera with me. The weather was great and I got a few B&W shots of Portland I like. All the pictures were shot on my Zeiss Super Ikonta III from the fifties with medium format rolls of Kodak Tri-X. Most of my path was on the waterfront so you'll see quite a few bridges in these pictures.
In the afternoon, there is a guy sitting by the stop sign at the entrance of the Hawthorn bridge. He's cool, a bit weird but does a good job at entertaining the long line of cars slowly passing by.


The bridge has a central part which is 2 ways, 2 side parts that are 1 way and 2 sidewalks with markings for a bike lane and a pedestrian lane. It's interesting to see that cars actually just drive on a metallic grid and you can see the water bellow under the "road". Kind of creepy (and slippery as well). The central part of the bridge lifts between the 2 towers, kind of like an elevator, to let tall boats pass. There's a guy that is sitting there all day, waiting for big boats to horn. I've seen it up only twice, but there is probably 1 or 2 boats a day :). When it happens the entertainer gets a lot of work as the line grows: operation of the bridge is really slooow.


There's a pedestrian path on both banks of the Willamette in the downtown section, with drinkable water fountains. Lots of people walk around there, or run, bike. It's a very live and enjoyable area.


More B&W Portland pictures here.

Spring Fields

Besides the pollen issues, spring has been gorgeous here. This morning I stopped on the side of the road on my way to work to take a few pictures:

Our place

I posted a few pictures of our place here. Yes they are in B&W, I hated the colors that came out with the a mix of artificial and natural light and I was too lazy to correct it so you'll have to see it in shades of gray.



Et voila.

Regate in Haifa ?

Last weekend I spotted strange white spots all over the sea, I still don't know where all these boats were sailing to but It made for a nice picture :).

10 years old roll of film ?

Some time ago, I pulled my old SLR camera from its bag and noticed it was loaded with some film. Half of the roll was used, and I had no idea what was on it, only thing I knew was that it was from before I switched to digital in 1999. I decided to finish the roll, and got it developped and scanned (poorly btw, I'll need to find a way to get better scans) at a nearby photo store. I was surprised the film was still in decent shape.
Once developped I realized that most pictures were from my vacations to the alps and Cantal 10 years ago with David, plus some pictures from Fleming dorm. The quality is definitely far from the files I get with my current digital camera, but there is a kind of old fashioned mood in these pictures that I like. Maybe I'll get an old film body that can take my new rangefinder lenses and go through a few rolls (it's not really worth it with my gigantic old/not so good optics SLR). We'll see if I get the courage to get the films developped and scanned or if I'll give up because of the hassle.

Anyways, here are a few examples:

My old tent

Some old church

a pass in Cantal

10 years later, my home in Haifa

and a rose in my living room.

The rest of the film is there.

Romeo and Juliette

Are so close from each other for so long, but have never been able to touch each other. They are so sad that one always has a tear ready to fall, but still their love is eternal and they are forever together:

More pictures of the beautiful stalactite cave near Bet Shemesh here.

Random pics

Saturday, I did pretty much nothing besides sleeping, having a nap or two and cooking. Well I also spent some time on M's balcony taking random IR pictures. As I like some of them quite a bit I am going to share them with you.

The Dwarf says Hello.


Towards the sea

You can see a few more here: Zenfolio Elfefe - IR

And once I was done with IR I took a few pictures of a roaring tiger and this one of an interresting lensing effect:

Concert in Caesarea

Last night we went to a Israeli-Spanish music and dance show in Caesarea. Our company had booked the roman amphitheater for the occasion and the show was great. It was a fusion of traditional spanish guitar music with a lot of heteroclyte percussions, all in a very "ethnic" style. It's quite hard to describe but we had a great time.



Additionaly to the pictures from yesterday I also (finaly) posted Bangkok and Sri-Lanka pictures on Zenfolio.

Digital UV photography

I was answering Jyby's question when I realized it was getting too long and could make an entry by itself.

So UV photography can be done with digital cameras but you need one that has a sensor that records UV radiation, so that does not have a UV-block filter in front of it. Mine is in that case, most other need to go through a workshop to tear apart the filter. For all normal applications not having this filter is actually a burden and many consider it a weakness of the camera (I need to use UV/IR block filters when taking regular pictures).

Then you need a way to block all visible light and IR, which is what the Baader-U filter does (the one I have). It works by having many coating layers that get the visible light and IR to interfere with themselves and cancel themselves (filtering by interference). It does not change the wavelength of light rays that go through just reflects and cancels the ones above 390nm and below 320nm wavelength. You can look up some infos here: Baader U-filter.

On top of that regular lenses have coatings that block the UV, as old film was quite sensitive to UV they needed to prevent pollution by UV radiation (which converge differently than visible light so it makes normal images appear blurry if they are polluted by UV). This is one of the reason most photographers were adding a UV-block filter in front of their lenses in the past, now some still do but it's mostly to avoid scratching the front of the lens accidentally, filters being relatively cheap and expendable. So you can not use modern regular lenses for UV photography, they will usually not let enough UV radiation go through and they also tend to have too many glass element that contribute even further to the filtering of the UV. There are crystal lenses that transmit UV very well but those are usually insanely priced and limited to very specific applications (labs, forensics, military...). Another option is to put a very old lens that doesn't have all these modern coatings, which is what I did (I use a lens from 1951), or to take a lens that has few glass element and re polish its front element to eliminate the coating.

On top of all this, human eye doesn't see UV so if you have a SLR you can not see what you are putting in the picture when the UV-pass filter is on (unless it provides "live-view". With a rangefinder you don't have the problem because you're not looking through the lens (but if you are limited by the quality of the parallax correction of your viewfinder).

Yeah I had a lot of fun gathering all the gear and info to do that, there is an excellent site that explains some of this and contains hundreds of sorted UV pictures of flowers: Naturfotograf

UV Flowers

Last weekend I spent some time on M's balcony taking pictures of flowers. I had bought a while back some UV-pass filter blocking all wavelengths besides UV just for that purpose as some flowers are supposed to show patterns invisible to the naked eye. I ended up spending a good 2 hours going on the balcony before finding some that were showing something different in UV but in the mean time I got quite a few other nice flower pictures in visible light and IR as well.

Petunias (UV) note the black stripes radiating from the center

Petunias (visible) just white

Orchis (visile light)

Embedding slideshows - Ein Hod

Saturday we went again to Ein Hod, but this time before everything was closed and we didn't miss the village entrance. We had a very nice afternoon, visiting art galleries, and enjoying local brews eating home made pizzas with live blues. Life is good over here :).

Trying to embed directly Zenfolio slideshows into the blog, for the lazy ones that don't feel like going to visit the galleries :). Edit: I removed the gallery it was slowing down the blog wayyyy too much.


It doesn't work that well for now, but Zenfolio doesn't expect its users to embed their slideshows in other pages so for now I doubt I'll be able to do any better. Let me know if you prefer the slideshows that way, or the old fashioned way.

Valentines

I recieved beautifull roses for Valentines this year, here is a picture of them... in Infra-Red light:

Panoramas

As I don't have a wide angle (I resisted the urge to buy one until now), when I face a nice scenary I end up taking multiple shots hoping that one day I won't be too lazy and will stitch it together. Well, sometimes it happens, and here are 2 panoramas. The first one is taken from "La Grande Motte" In Tignes, France, looking towards the "Mont Blanc":

The second one is the river and Charles bridge in Prague (In both case I suggest to look at the large version to see something).